A. Technical Field
The present invention relates to signal processing, and more particularly, to systems and methods for detecting peaks of signals in a continuous data stream.
B. Background of the Invention
Various techniques for detecting peaks of signals in a continuous data stream have been developed in the past decades. For instance, ultra-wide band (UWB), which is a radio technology, is used at a very low energy level for short-range, high-bandwidth communications using a large portion of the radio spectrum. Recently, UWB has been applied to collect target sensor data, locate and track target sensors with high precision. A receiver of UWB signals/pulses that are transmitted by a UWB transmitter should be able to detect/identify the UWB signals in a continuous data stream that is typically mixed with noise. To identify the UWB signals, the receiver should be able to detect the peaks of the UWB signals.
In some applications, the pulse widths of UWB signals may decrease to the order of nanosecond. As such, techniques for detecting the UWB signals should be carefully designed to capture the peaks of short UWB signals and differentiate the desired signals from noise. Another challenge that a signal processing engineer has to cope with is associated with multipath reflections of a strong pulse in the digital domain. For instance, when a transmitter transmits a UWB signal, the signal may be reflected by objects before it arrives at a receiver. As such, when an incoming signal is reconstructed/represented by the receiver in the digital domain, the reflected signals (or, equivalently, multipath reflections) may be superimposed onto the direct UWB signal. As a first step to differentiate the desired signal from the multipath reflections and/or other noise, it is necessary to detect/identify peaks of the desired signals in the continuous data stream. Thus, there is a need for a method for detecting the peaks of signals in a continuous data stream.